In the second cantica of the Divine Comedy, Dante approaches the seventh and highest terrace of Mount Purgatory and is greeted by a multitude of spirits being cleansed of the stains of lust. Dante cries out to these suffering ‘shades’ in an attempt to succour, “may your deepest longing / soon be appeased and you be lodged within / the heaven that’s most full of love, most spacious.” In Dante’s imagination, sin occured because our desires are not directed to the proper ends that God has designated for them. Instead, we try to satiate our longings with the base and profane, unsuitable fare for the immaterial soul that continues to hunger after a more lasting spiritual prize. The fourth-century Church Father St. Augustine of Hippo called this humanity’s ‘disordered appetite’, a phrase fitting for a species whose mythology of origins was shaped by temptatious fruit in a garden. Dante’s corrective was an arduous climb up the seven storeys of Mount Purgatory, where upon its narrow crags and rocky faces the sinner was purified of his disordered attachments to sensual things.
It was from Dante’s imaginative moral geography that Thomas Merton’s autobiography gained its famed title. Merton is remembered today as a modern-day mystic, a restless seeker of peace and meaning whose voluminous writings addressed the transformative power of the Gospel to cosmopolitan audiences of his day. His life and works recall the dramatic spiritual Odysseys of personalities ranging from Augustine to Weil to Kerouac; of men and women who went to extraordinary, often disorientating lengths in pursuit of what they thought to be Good. Throughout his life, Merton encountered this Goodness most profoundly in his experience of true interior peace: the silence which stills and satisfies the heart, rooted in the practice of religion. Forgoing a dilettantish past that held pleasure and reputation in the brightest of lights, he eventually found this silence in the contemplative life of a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani. All this is recounted in The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton’s first and greatest confessional work that chronicles his life’s episodes and epiphanic about-turn with charming, self-effacing candour.
But early in his wanderings, Merton was convinced that his vocation lay elsewhere – specifically, with the Franciscans at St. Bonaventure University, where the friars taught and prayed with joyful simplicity against the sprawling hardwood forests of the northern Appalachians. Turned away from the novitiate when he revealed that he had fathered an illegitimate child, Merton became dejected that his priestly vocation was quashed.
It was only while making a retreat with the Trappists in the austerity of Gethsemani that Merton sensed a different call being made on his life. He emphasises that this call was not a wholly sweet one. Merton was disturbed by the rigour and asceticism of the Trappists, and the prospect of maintaining a strict fast was especially fearful. In the mind of the worldly Merton – the quintessential modern man, still harbouring literary ambitions and whose conversion had been mediated by his attraction to the sensuous and beautiful – this would be an impossible denial of his natural dispositions. When asked by Brother Matthew if he planned to stay at Gethsemani, Merton feebly answered that he couldn’t because he still had a job. He was under employment, teaching undergraduate English at St. Bonaventure. One imagines the elderly monk bemused at Merton’s response – to think that a man would discern his religious vocation, a matter of spiritual life and death, based on his responsibilities in the workplace!
Yet even stronger than his trepidation was an unfading attraction to the lives of the Trappists: the beauty of their prayers; the solemn strength of the community; the penetrating silence that seemed to swallow him up in an unmistakable holy peace. This desire continued to fester in the months following the retreat, and Merton continued to agonise over the pull of the cloister. What explained the magnetism of Gethsemani? What lay behind its staidly walls, that Merton could exalt this quiet monastery as the true capital and vital centre of his entire country?
Beyond the rustic beauty and simplicity of the Trappist life was the bare fact that these monks had sacrificed everything for God. For Merton, the gifted young man who had plundered the world and fattened himself on fast and fleeting glories, the imitation of perfection would demand a purgation through exactly the opposite. To lose his old clothes and put on the garment of Christ was to ascend Mount Calvary – and Dante’s Purgatory – with this anguished Man of Sorrows. Having made up his mind, Merton explained the decision to his friend and confidant, the Franciscan Father Philotheus: “Father, I want to give God everything.”
Merton heard the voice of God as it drew him towards choices that he might never have made himself. It is as Jesus prophesised to Peter: there will come a day where God will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go. (Jn 21:8) And perhaps it would be prudent to heed this call; after all, what justifies such confidence in our own desires and preferences, shaped as they have been by self-centredness and our pull to the trappings of the world?
Merton returned that same year amid a harsh Kentucky winter to join the poor, happy men of Gethsemani, and professed his solemn vows there five years later. In the abbey’s cemetery, you will find rows of simple white crosses, marking where these Brothers lie today.
Like Merton, we’re often guilty of clinging to our indecision, hesitant to trust God (and ourselves) with our choices and their consequences. We sometimes leave the abbey, only to come back once more. And each time we return, we are met by Brother Matthew’s question to Merton as he arrived again at Gethsemani’s locked gate: this time, have you come to stay? Treading the path of discernment means finding an answer, day after day, until we arrive at the conclusion of Christ’s agony in the garden: not my will but yours be done.
Vanity runs; love digs, said the French philosopher Gustave Thibon. If you fly away from yourself, your prison will run with you. We flee when God beckons because it seems like there is so much to lose: comfort, ambition, perhaps freedom as the world perceives it. But Pope Benedict XVI reminds us otherwise: “Young people, do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything.” Stripped from the high altar are our idols and their mimicry, and in exchange, a love which is utterly gratuitous and simple. A scandalous movement of God to man that asks only in return for our total trust in Him.
Truthfully, Merton’s story didn’t end at Gethsemani. He continued to struggle with his vocation as a contemplative for decades, and his fascination with Eastern religions took him to the narrowest fringe of Catholic orthodoxy. Yet even in his most terrible hour, Merton never abandoned his priesthood or the Church. A few weeks before his untimely death he wrote to a friend: “keep telling everyone that I am a monk of Gethsemani and intend to remain one all my days.” In so many decisive moments, Merton chose each time to close the abbey gate and stay. Such decisions to stay, to continue wrestling with and discerning the unfathomable, can hardly come easy. For to remain is to sacrifice, to continue the ascent of Calvary, to endure and lose oneself for the sake of He who expired and gave Himself on the Cross. Only then do we come to know the Christ and begin to live in His image; only then do we become more fully His sons and daughters, who have been raised from nothing and recalled to life.
Merton was an icon of the moment: a Columbia man, at home everywhere and nowhere, part of a rising class of self-conscious literati that made a glittering monument of the world. But because of his surrender to the “four walls of my new freedom”, those plain white boundaries at the horizon of Gethsemani, he has also become to us a man for all time. Purgatory, in Thomas Merton’s story, is a upward battle, full of difficult choices. But we can choose faithfully, knowing these choices are meant to lead us home – to a home most spacious, and most full of love.
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